with David Blaska

It’s scoundrel time for the progressive racism hucksters

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Paul Fanlund is slapping his forehead. Why didn’t I think of that?! Why didn’t I play the race card on Scott Walker?

Mr. Fanlund is editor of the corporation that speaks as if it were a person, if that person were a non-reported, in-kind contributor to the Our Ms. Burke for Governor campaign. Paul is energized by the New Republic magazine cover story this week, “The unelectable whiteness of Scott Walker — a journey through the poisonous, racially divided world that produced a Republican star.”

Perhaps because I never listen to right-wing Milwaukee talk radio and its subliminal or overt racism, I’ve underestimated the central role that race plays for Walker and how, in his world view, Madison and Milwaukee are different. In Madison, it’s about those shiftless, self-entitled bureaucrats. In Milwaukee, it’s about those shiftless, self-entitled African-Americans.

Everywhere else in the state, including in the three affluent and almost exclusively white counties surrounding Milwaukee, it’s about hard-working and God-fearing people like himself.

Charging Scott Walker with racism is rich coming from a media corporation (The Capital Times) that employs no blacks (compared to three of the governor’s 16 cabinet-level appointees).

Charging Scott Walker with racism takes some hubris when Madison, run by progressives these last 40 years, has been labeled one of the most racist cities in America.

Charging Scott Walker with racism is high chutzpah when the Madison School Board and its teachers union — cheered on by the local Democrat(ic) party — refused to charter the Urban League’s proposed Madison Prep high school, which was designed to address the yawning chasm between black and white student achievement here in the Emerald City. Democrat-supporting, public sector, dues-paying union membership hath its privileges.

Could it be that liberalism, now costumed as “progressivism,” has failed our minority population? Scott Walker talks about how America celebrates Independence Day; his party promotes opportunity. The Democratic Party, by contrast, champions expanding the Victim Class. Who else would feature Sandra Fluke, prime time, at its national convention to demand that someone pay for her birth control?

Haven’t you ‘helped’ enough?

Author Jason L. Riley notes that a proponent of black reparations spends most of his cover story in The Atlantic magazine “detailing how previous government efforts to narrow black-white social and economic disparities — from Reconstruction to the New Deal to the Great Society — have largely failed.”

Yet he concludes that what’s needed is more of the same — namely, another grand wealth-redistribution scheme in the guise of slavery reparations.

… Notwithstanding this government largess, the official poverty rate in 2012 was higher than it was in 1966, and the black-white poverty gap has widened over the past decade. The racial disparity in incarceration rates is also larger today than it was in 1960. Black unemployment, on average, has been twice as high as white unemployment for five decades.

One reason that Uncle Sam’s altruism has not been successful is because the government is attempting to do for blacks what blacks can only do for themselves. Until those in the black underclass develop the work habits, behaviors and attitudes that proved necessary for other groups to rise, they will continue to struggle. And to the extent that a social program, however well-meaning, interferes with a group’s self-development, it does more harm than good.

Upward mobility depends on work and family. Government policies that undermine the work ethic — open-ended welfare benefits, for example — help keep poor people poor. Why study hard in school if you will be held to a lower academic standard?

No, the party of government cannot afford to lose its largest victim class. What would happen to Democrats if, for instance, black folks became overwhelmingly prosperous? (A. They’d vote Republican.)

To paraphrase the odious Lillian Hellman Samuel Johnson, crying racism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

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About This Blog

Raised on a farm near Sun Prairie, David Blaska is a recovering liberal who spent 18 years in daily newspapers, including 12 at The Capital Times in Madison as a reporter and editor. He served Gov. Tommy Thompson as acting press secretary in 1998 and is a veteran and survivor of 19 years in state government. He served 12 years on the Dane County Board of Supervisors. From December 2007 to November 2011 he wrote the consistently popular "Blaska's Blog" for Isthmus online's "The Daily Page" until, he says, the intolerant liberals ran him off. He blogs from Madison.